MASSON v. NEW YORKER MAGAZINE, INC.

Justice White, with whom Justice Scalia joins, concurring in part and dissenting in part.

I join Parts I, II-A, II-D, and III-A, but cannot wholly agree with the remainder of the opinion. My principal disagreement is with the holding, ante, at 19, that "a deliberate alteration of the words uttered by a plaintiff does not equate with knowledge of falsity . . . unless the alteration results in a material change in the meaning conveyed by the statement."

Under New York TimesCo. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964), "malice" means deliberate falsehood or reckless disregard for whether the fact asserted is true or false. Id., at 279-280. As the Court recognizes, the use of quotation marks in reporting what a person said asserts that the person spoke the words as quoted. As this case comes to us, it is to be judged on the basis that in the instances identified by the Court, the reporter, Malcolm, wrote that Masson said certain things that she knew Masson did not say. By any definition of the term, this was "knowing falsehood": Malcolm asserts that Masson said these very words, knowing that he did not. The issue, as the Court recognizes, is whether Masson spoke the words attributed to him, not whether the fact, if any, asserted by the attributed words is true or false. In my view, we need to go no further to conclude that the defendants in this case were not entitled to summary judgment on the issue of malice with respect to any of the six erroneous quotations.

That there was at least an issue for the jury to decide on the question of deliberate or reckless falsehood, does not mean that plaintiffs were necessarily entitled to go to trial. If, as a matter of law, reasonable jurors could not conclude that attributing to Masson certain words that he did not say amounted to libel under California law, i. e., "exposed[d] [Masson] to hatred, contempt, ridicule, or obloquy, or which causes him to be shunned or avoided, or which has a tendency to injure him in his occupation," Cal. Civ. Code Ann. 45 (West 1982), a motion for summary judgment on this ground would be justified.

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I would suppose, for example that if Malcolm wrote that Masson said that he wore contact lenses, when he said nothing about his eyes or his vision, the trial judge would grant summary judgment for the defendants and dismiss the case. The same would be true if Masson had said "I was spoiled as a child by my Mother," whereas, Malcolm reports that he said "I was spoiled as a child by my parents." But if reasonable jurors could conclude that the deliberate misquotation was libelous, the case should go to the jury.

This seems to me to be the straightforward, traditional approach to deal with this case. Instead, the Court states that deliberate misquotation does not amount to New York Times malice unless it results in a material change in the meaning conveyed by the statement. This ignores the fact that under New York Times, reporting a known falsehood — here the knowingly false attribution — is sufficient proof of malice. The falsehood, apparently, must be substantial; the reporter may lie a little, but not too much.

This standard is not only a less manageable one than the traditional approach, but it also assigns to the courts issues that are for the jury to decide. For a court to ask whether a misquotation substantially alters the meaning of spoken words in a defamatory manner is a far different inquiry than whether reasonable jurors could find that the misquotation was different enough to be libelous. In the one case, the court is measuring the difference from its own point of view; in the other it is asking how the jury would or could view the erroneous attribution.

The Court attempts to justify its holding in several ways, none of which is persuasive. First, it observes that an interviewer who takes notes of any interview will attempt to reconstruct what the speaker said and will often knowingly attribute to the subject words that were not used by the speaker. Ante, at 16. But this is nothing more than an assertion that authors may misrepresent because they cannot remember what the speaker actually said. This should be no dilemma for such authors, or they could report their story without purporting to quote when they are not sure, thereby leaving the reader to trust or doubt the author rather than believing that the subject actually said what he is claimed to have said. Moreover, this basis for the Court's rule has no application where there is a tape of the interview and the author is in no way at a loss to know what the speaker actually said. Second, the Court speculates that even with the benefit of a recording, the author will find it necessary at times to reconstruct, ante, at 17, but again, in those cases why should the author be free to put his or her reconstruction in quotation marks, rather than report without them? Third, the Court suggests that misquotations that do not materially alter the meaning inflict no injury to reputation that is compensable as defamation. Ante, at 19. This may be true, but this is a question of defamation or not, and has nothing to do with whether the author deliberately put within quotation marks and attributed to the speaker words that the author knew the speaker did not utter.

As I see it, the defendants' motion for summary judgment based on lack of malice should not have been granted on any of the six quotations considered by the Court in Part III-B of its opinion. I therefore dissent from the result reached with respect to the "It Sounded Better" quotation dealt with in paragraph (c) of Part III-B, but agree with the Court's judgment on the other five misquotations.

Notes

1
In dealing with the intellectual gigolo passage, the Court of Appeals ruled that there was no malice but in the alternative went on to say that as a matter of law the erroneous attribution was not actionable defamation. 895 F. 2d 1535, 1540-1541 (CA9 1989).